...up the I-10, cutting through the heart of the city, past the movable Expansion Bridges and away from the Art Deco pit known as Factory Row. Once home to Blue Collar steel workers, Factory Row was now a playground for the rich, the wanna’ be rich, and anyone else willing to fork over the hefty cover charges and even heftier drink prices.
The sweat-bellied beer grunts with their worn hands, blistered and crusty, were long gone, discreetly forgotten and replaced by egotist yuppies and their heroin thin girlfriends wearing stringy manes and designer clothes. Gone too were the darkened factories where the hardened men had toiled, laid to waste by foreign competition.
The smoke-worn beer and shot joints were gone as well, sanitized by bulldozers. As used up and valueless as their aging patrons, they too had been replaced. Where once stood simple squat, brick and mortar buildings, now rose icons to greed and indulgence. Clean glass, cheap steel and carefully directed motifs had cleansed the rot. Here and there a link to the area’s past dotted the landscape, delivered from certain doom by a nostalgic citizen’s group, or a politician looking for cheap votes...
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